The Consolations of Philosophy by Alain de Botton (Pantheon), 244 pages, $22.95

On the first page of the first chapter of The Consolations of
Philosophy, Alain de Botton describes a desultory moment in New York's
Metropolitan Museum of Art: "Having reached a surfeit of paintings in the
Impressionist galleries, I was looking for a sign for the cafeteria -- where I
hoped to buy a glass of a certain variety of American chocolate milk of which I
was at that time extremely fond."

What comes between Alain and his NesQuik is Jacques-Louis David's 1786 painting
The Death of Socrates. (Images of both the chocolate milk and the David
appear on succeeding pages; and throughout this book, the many well-chosen
illustrations -- e.g., a goat, a lamprey, a mountain -- elicit both
giggling and insight.) The painting prompts de Botton to reflect on the trial
in which Socrates was convicted "of failing to worship the city's gods, of
introducing religious novelties and of corrupting the young men of Athens" and
was sentenced to death. De Botton envies the philosopher's refusal to renounce
his philosophy -- an independence of mind that contrasts with his own
disposition toward servility. With strangers, the author says, he often
displays "salival enthusiasm born of a morbid, indiscriminate desire for
affection." So he resolves to accept Socrates's exemplary invitation to
"intelligent skepticism." He will do so by turning to a small group of
philosophers "bound by a common interest in saying a few consoling and
practical things about the causes of our greatest griefs."

De Botton is both droll and earnest -- it's the voice of a man who wears
starched collars but has messy hair. His novel The Romantic Movement
used the language of self-help to look at how romance challenges a lover's
sense of reality; his brilliant nonfiction book How Proust Can Change Your
Life mingled self-help with literary criticism and biography. The
Consolations of Philosophy grafts self-help onto yet one more genre -- the
academic primer.

Some readers may conclude that with this book (named after Boethius's
sixth-century text) de Botton's ambition has gotten the better of him. In
chapters of roughly 40 pages each, he summarizes the thought of Socrates,
Epicurus, Seneca, Montaigne, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, distilling each
philosopher's career into a few aphoristic lessons that offer consolation for,
respectively, "Unpopularity," "Not Having Enough Money," "Frustration,"
"Inadequacy," "A Broken Heart," and "Difficulties." But Socrates offers more
than just "help in overcoming our meekness" and the common-sense imperative
that one should logically examine one's beliefs. And when de Botton asserts
that "Montaigne outlined a new kind of philosophy, one which acknowledged how
far we were from the rational, serene creatures whom most of the ancient
thinkers had taken us to be" and that he gave unprecedented attention to the
human body and to everyday material things (like melons and radishes), you
might find yourself asking whether Aristotle didn't make similar observations a
couple millennia earlier.

It would be easier to overlook this sort of oversimplification if de Botton
weren't a director of the graduate philosophy program at London University.
The Consolations of Philosophy's simple, witty, trustworthy sentences
reminded me of another popularizing work, C.S. Lewis's Mere
Christianity. I cringe when I meet people who accept Lewis's simplistic
theology as gospel truth; yet I know many people whose mature, sophisticated,
and gracious faiths it first ignited. The Consolations of Philosophy
will surely have the same diverse effects on would-be philosophers. In
describing Montaigne's heavily allusive style, de Botton identifies one
important aspect of the ideal relationship between a book and its reader. "What
is shy and confused in us is succinctly and elegantly phrased in them, our
pencil lines and annotations in the margins of their books and our borrowings
from them indicating where we find a piece of ourselves, a sentence or two
built of the very substance of which our own minds are made." Certainly
self-help books work this way. So does The Consolations of Philosophy,
offering myriad answers to readers who come asking, "What's in it for me?"

Like a good 101 professor, de Botton indulges that question, milks it for
laughs, and then presses lightly toward parsing the ethical and political
dimensions of his readers' self-interest. Discussing Seneca's writings on
irrational anger and frustration, he suggests, "There is an easy way to measure
our inner levels of abjectness and friendliness to ourselves: we should examine
how well we respond to noise." Despite its shortcomings, The Consolations of
Philosophy satisfies our self-interest in order to ease our ignorance and
isolation.